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iPhone and Multi-touch development (2008-09-21)

After some months where I had big difficulties on finding the time to do some personal research, as I always did, it seems that I am finally finding again this mixture of motivation, constancy, and of course time. So in the last month I’ve been studying Objective-C with iPhone SDK and, as you can see from my more technical posts, I’m quite happy with the results I’m getting. Playing with iPhone SDK means also have a very portable way to test multi-touch interactions. This kind of applications are definitely not new for many developers, just imagine the Tangible Media Group at MIT, then of course all the Jeff Han’s & co. So despite it seems I got too late to face these issues, I reckon there is still so much to do and experiment with these kind of interactions but also that probably is getting a bit over rated. From one side there are companies like Apple and Microsoft that want to show to the world how innovative they are. The first delivering multi-touch devices to millions of people, but with a small usage in it, the second spreading info about new projects (Surface, Interactive Wall, etc.. ) and more importantly the fact that Windows 7 will support multi-touch, leaving since now just words, no facts. From the other side people that are probably not sure about how useful these interactions might be. I don’t think it’s a case that not many other mobile companies are planning to fight iPhone with similar feature.

It is definitely good fun start thinking about how you would architecture an application with that kind of functionalities, but it is still quite hard to see so many useful cases, a part of course the wow factor (which many might be consider enough). For this reason despite I am quite happy with some technical parts of my experiments, the interactivity still doesn’t convince me and it’s probably time I start thinking about it more seriously.